Writer Essad Bey cut a dashing figure in the cafes of prewar Berlin. Son of an Islamic nobleman, he presented himself as a wild desert prince. But 'Bey' was an elaborate facade created by Lev Nussimbaum, the son of a Jewish oil millionaire, born in Azerbaijan during the first bloody days of the Russian Revolution. Bey was on the run all his life, exchanging the oppressions of Bolshevism for the rising threat of the Third Reich. Reiss is a dogged sleuth, tracking Bey through all his shifting identities, from the mountains of Georgia to his final resting place on the Amalfi coast. But this is far more than a biography. Instead, Reiss takes the alluring, insouciant figure of Bey as a springboard into a intricate and wide-ranging analysis of Europe on the verge of war.

Fans of Russ Meyer's movies are unlikely to be ruffled by the jovial crudity of this biography. For those less than thrilled by sexploitation, the reduction of women into 'fleshy firecrackers' with melon breasts can get wearisome. But McDonough's whirlwind enthusiasm for his subject is infectious and his pornographer hero certainly intriguing. Meyer was given his first camera at the age of 14 and, despite brushes with Hollywood, stayed true to his distinctive vision. While the comparisons with Hitchcock don't quite hold up, Meyer's cartoon world of 'criminally abundant women' on a spree of sex and murder has been influential. Not even feminist Camille Paglia was entirely immune to Meyer's celluloid charms. Should you tire of the plot, you could always tot up the inventive synonyms for breast.

Two Lives by Vikram Seth (Abacus £8.99)

When Seth first came to England, he lived with his Uncle Shanti and Aunt Henny. Neither was especially expansive about their past, but after Henny's death, Seth began to interview Shanti about his life. The story that he revealed, abetted later by the discovery of Henny's letters, is an extraordinary one. Shanti also left India to study, training as a dentist in Berlin and boarding with Henny's Jewish family. But the year was 1933 and the gay life the family shared was gradually eroded by the horrors of Nazism. What's remarkable about Seth's work is its clear-eyed assessment of a world at war. But though he justifies the biography as marking the lives that guided his, it's hard not to feel a little queasy as he spills the dignified Henny's most private correspondence.

The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes (Harper Perennial £7.99)

The public conception of Mrs Beeton as a stout Victorian matriarch, well endowed in bosom and mother to a brood of 10, is wildly inaccurate, as this persuasive biography recounts. Isabella Beeton died aged 28, having written, five years before, the cookery book with which she would be permanently associated. But the word 'written' should be taken loosely, since Beeton was something of a magpie with other people's recipes. Hughes is a peerless researcher and her account strips away 150 years of accumulated myth to reveal a bright young journalist whose preoccupations with social mores reflected the aspirations of the Victorian middle class. There's plenty of scandal in the mix, but Hughes's conviction that Mrs Beeton died of syphilis seems an imaginative leap too far.